Joystiq reports that the Xbox 360 Premium Package costs $715 dollars per unit. Microsoft has once again chose to make a extremely robust system while seemingly disreguarding cost. The original Xbox campaign eventually resulted in the company enduring over $4 billion in losses.

"Earlier numbers by Business Week may have reported that Microsoft is losing $126 on every Xbox 360 sold. That figure is now believed to be a bit higher by some. According to Insider Scoop, the world's largest software maker is losing upwards of $300 per console sold. From the article: "A high ranking friend at IBM, one that worked on the Xbox 360 chip design, tipped us regarding the real expenses involved in manufacturing the Xbox 360... 'It costs Microsoft approximately $715 to make, the manufacturing costs are still too high, another reason why theyÂ’re producing relatively small quantities.”

Well, almost, it is actually better than that. The new Nissan Urge concept car is what we are talking about here. This “Stylish” futuristic car sports aggresive styling, a powerful motor and a target price of only $20,000. The best part of the Urge? When you are parked, you can flip a switch, and the car becomes the biggest Xbox 360 controller available, allowing you to play PGR3 using the gas, brake and steering wheel of the car to control the game! Ok now, honestly, how many of you would be spending most of your time in the garage if you owned this thing? It is not yet clear wether the Xbox 360 is a gimmick for the unveiling, or if it will be available when the care is manufactured, but I am sure everyone reading this is hoping for the later

Team PI has been hard at work looking for ways to get around the security on the Xbox 360. With all that gaming power, you can rest assured that the Xbox 360 will become a focal point for hacking efforts. Well, it seems, according to Team PI that Microsoft may have provided the first step towards cracking the Xbox 360’s security by way of the Kiosk disc. Here is what Team PI had to say:

*** YES YOU CAN BURN THIS ISO AND PLAY IT IN YOUR XBOX-360 ***
Microsoft left us with this blanket statement:

Xbox 360 retail kiosks have started arriving at retailers. Due to the nature of the distribution process, not all kiosks are hitting simultaneously, but are continuing to pop up in retailers across the country in the coming weeks.

The kiosks are designed for a retail environment and feature game samples, game trailers and product information. Team Pi leaves you with this Pillow statement:

It seems Microsoft was in such a hurry to get this stuff out
that they forgot to set the media protection on this disc.
This leaves hackers with the posibility to hack around with
this disc that load from a normal DVDR5 backup! - Team Pi
also notes that the all datafiles on this disc isn't signed in
any way, and will allow for extensive modification for producing
exploits to further our efford to hack this box!

Playable (hackable) games on this disc: Call of Duty 2, Hexic, Kameo, King Kong. Also includes lots of game and accessory demos in video format.
Nothing ripped, just foreign videos were downsampled to fit onto a normal DVDR5!

YES you can run this! Burn the iso, put it into your xbox and be very amazed... Next, think of the posibilities of hacking this little demo disc that we might start running code on the retail xbox 360's !
So the second task is done. We hope this encourages all hackers, coders and crackers out there to take up the challenge. Enjoy!

Special note to the Clear kids: Yes, we are old and lazy, and no, we are not going to do some scene war against you. Life is too short for that, and our dicks are allready large enough

Keep up the hard work!
Pi Putting the 360' Spin on the Xbox :-)

UPDATE: There has apparently been a video of someone hotswapping a disc on an Xbox 360 making the rounds. We do not vouch for wether or not this video is real, but at the very least you can see what Team PI is talking about.

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Update:2

Now, fans have dug out a lot more from it.

* You can replace the *.wmv files in the discs with your own ones, they will still play!! E.g. change the '/videos/pgr3.wmv' with some other HD wmv file, and you will be able to play it!
* XEX and EXE files are still signed. Only data files are unsigned.
* You won’t be able to use this disc for booting retail version of the games by simply placing files into designated folders.
* The disc is fully playable.
* Add/remove files on the disc doesn’t prevent from using other functions, which mean no integrity check for this disc.
* The ISO is a standard one which you can browse with those ISO tools. You can also put this DVD into your DVD drive on PC to browse.
* Live Arcade games are actually Flash games. You can run them within your browser on PC. unfortunately, replacing these games with home made ones only lead to a crash of the Xbox 360.
* Game demos won’t run if the system language is set to German (or maybe other languages as well).
* You can find more pictures and videos by browsing the disc on a PC than in the Xbox 360 dashboard.

CNet has published their top 10 must have gadgets list for 2005. With only 2 weeks of exposure (when the list was compiled) the Xbox 360 settled in as the number 2 must have gadget, just behind the PSP. According to CNet, the only thing that held the 360 back from the number 1 position was the various problems at launch (defects, overheating and crashing problems).

The wait for next-gen gaming is over, but Microsoft's Xbox 360 has some growing pains to work out. Namely, overheating, crashing issues, and a hefty $399 price tag. The plus side? It offers the best networked gaming experience we've seen, integration with Windows Media Center PCs, and backward-compatibility with some Xbox games. It's the holiday season's hottest gift.

Xbox Today is reporting that a passenger with an Xbox 360 in a carry-on case sparked a terror alert at MacArthur Airport on Long Island December 27th, forcing a terminal to be evacuated.
Officials say the Chicago-bound flier, worried that his game console might be swiped if he checked it, instead put it in a metal case that he carried through security checkpoints.

When thethe container carrying the Xbox 360 passed through an X-ray machine, and screeners thought it might have held a bomb.

"The package looked to be suspicious with wires running through it," said airport spokeswoman Michele Remsen.

WSJ: Xbox Live Microsoft's Big Bet In an article published today, the Wall Street Journal discusses the importance of the Xbox Live service in Microsoft's Xbox 360, and how the good, or bad, implementation of online play will affect the machine's success.

With analysts pegging Microsoft's investment into Xbox Live anywhere from $200 million to upwards of $1 billion, the article said Microsoft is banking on the popularity of the service to attract customers from competitors.

Only not everyone believes Microsoft can reach their goal of connecting half of all Xbox 360 users online, but they all agree now would be its best opportunity to do so. With Nintendo's online service committed to, but not yet explained in detail, and Sony's online service very much up in the air, the 360's centralized online service remains the most fleshed out of the services.

Microsoft could attract a higher percentage of online users for the Xbox 360 than it has with the original Xbox, industry analysts said, in part because the company has positioned the console to be a one-stop digital entertainment center, allowing users to download and play movies and music and view digital photos. But some analysts said they were skeptical that interest among gamers in playing online is strong enough for Microsoft to meet its goal of getting half of Xbox 360 users to use the online service. "The market for online gaming for Xbox is maybe 20%" of users, Mr. Pachter said.

One strategy Microsoft is using to expand its audience is Xbox Live Arcade, a service geared to more casual gamers that features games that are faster to learn, and don't take as long to play. It lets users download arcade-style games for free and test them for a few days -- or for a few levels of the game. If they like a game, users pay between $5 and $15 to keep it. Multiplayer titles include Gauntlet and Joust, popular games from the 1980s.

Yes, according to Richard Huddy, European Developers Relations Manager for ATI, the Playstation 3, for all its technological advancements is just a bumbling mess in comparison to the Xbox 360.

Huddy, who worked on development of the Xbox 360, in an interview with Edge Magazine told the magazine that the Playstation 3 is basically a souped-up amalgamation of existing PC architecture without much consideration for making developers happy with its design. He questions Sony's partnership with Nvidia, adding that the giant video game company chose to forego compromises in design, than compromises in hardware when it went with a customized version of Nvdia's 7800GTX.

Interviewer: "You make it sound so unrefined!"

Huddy: "[Laughs.] Well, yeah, but the tragedy is that it is unrefined. There's a lot brute force in there - I'd be the last person to admit it, but the truth is that the 7800GTX is a pretty powerful piece of hardware, but it's not very elegant ... Instead it's been put together at the end of quite a complicated process."

Huddy had fighting words for Sony. "Our GPUs instead are custom-designed components, and that's one of the fundamental reasons why I think Xbox 360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a pretty healthy margin in the long run."

Huddy might have a natural bias against the Playstation 3, having been involved in the Xbox 360 development process; and as an ATI employee, competing directly against Nvidia. Are his words truthful?

Richard Huddy, European Developer Relations Manager for ATI, has recently done an interview with Edge Magazine. Richard spoke about the some of the technical aspects of the Xbox 360, and threw a few comments out on the PS3 as well. Basically, in his view, the PS3 has a lot of power, but, in his words, it is “brute force power”, where the Xbox 360 has a much more refined power. “A pretty powerful peice of hardware, but just not elegant”. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

How do you think your work on the 360 measures up to PS3?

I take a fairly robust view on this. The Xbox 360 GPU is designed to be a console GPU - that's what we set out to produce when we started the collaboration with Microsoft; let's build a really powerful, really flexible kind of general purpose GPU which doesn't have performance cliffs where if you do certain things suddenly the performance crashes down by a factor of two or something like that; let's have things pretty predictable and easy to work with, and let's generate about the best performance that we can- so we went for things like the unified shaders and so on. The PS3 has been designed in a quite different way because of the way the process worked. We sat down with Microsoft and said: 'This is what we think we can build', and they said: 'Yes, but what about...?' And they started picking holes in our design, so we came up with a collaborative design. They didn't put a spec in front of us and say: 'How much for this?' That definitely wasn't the dialogue - in fact that would make it more of a monologue; it would be kind of bidding on prices and so on. Instead what we have is a very collaborative design.

With the PS3 my understanding of what happened is that they had three different internal hardware solutions - at one point, for example, as I understand it there was a proposal to use multiple Cell processors just to handle the graphics. And towards the end of the process, as the story goes, they took a look at the three internal tenders and decided than none of them would actually do; none of them would deliver the kind of performance and quality that games programmers could use and would make for a good cost-effective console, so they had to go out and shop around. And one of the places they shopped was Nvidia, and what Nvidia did was say: 'Well, you've got this relatively short timeframe, you've got roughly this kind of budget, I'll tell you what we'll do: we'll do you a good price on what is essentially the 7800GTX'. So that's a PC chip, and if you look at the architecture of the two consoles you can see we've done bizarre things that they haven't. We've built ten megabytes of dedicated ED RAM which knows how to antialias and so on, because that's a specific way of addressing a console's problem. It's bizarre in a PC sense but a special skill for a console builder. Whereas the PS3 has 256 meg of system memory and 256 meg of graphics memory it communicates through what is effectively a PCI express bus. It uses GDDR3 fast memory, it's essentially a PC graphics design bolted on to a Cell processor and 256 meg of fast system memory...

You make it sound so unrefined!

[Laughs.] Well, yeah, but the tragedy is that it is unrefined. There's a lot brute force in there - I'd be the last person to admit it, but the truth is that the 7800GTX is a pretty powerful piece of hardware, but it's not very elegant, it hasn't got the kind of: 'Well, how do we design this to be the best possible console we can build for this money?' Instead it's been put together at the end of quite a complicated process. We have two very different design processes. If Microsoft had come to us and said: 'All right, what are we going to do about this graphics chip, then? Let's sign the contract and let's go', but then we'd got two thirds through and they'd said: 'Look, you guys aren't going to deliver - now what are you going to do?' and then walked away from us, they would have ended up with a design very much like the PS3 in some essential characteristics - it would have had to use bought-in components. And our GPUs instead are custom-designed components, and that's one of the fundamental reasons why I think Xbox 360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a pretty healthy margin in the long run.

So how about this one: can those E3 PS3 demos be achieved on Xbox 360?

Well, why not take another combative line here? I think it's more likely that they can be realised on an Xbox 360 than they can be on a PS3. Those things are movies generated using whatever DCC software the houses had in mind. The Epic demo was running on a PC, and it was done using an early 7800 in SLI mode, so that was a high-end PC demo, but the movies were generated as movies and dressed up as: 'This is what you can expect from a PS3', but that's probably overstating what the PS3 can do a little bit. Indeed, it's well beyond what we expect the PS3 to be able to do. So I guess we'll just have to see what happens..."

As we reported before, a group of warm-hearted random hackers came together all with the same purpose – to make the Xbox 360 to run their own flash programs. And now, they seem to organize better. A wiki named “Flash for XBOX 360 Wiki” has been launched. You can try to find anything related to creating a Xbox360 compatible flash program, or even share your own discoveries on this topic with the whole scene.

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Mod Chip for the Xbox 360 Already Being Tested

Could it be true? Could there already be a mod chip for the Xbox 360? Microsoft has stated repeatedly that they have built extra security measures into their new console, but it would appear that the hacking community has already been hard at work! Infinity Mods has announced that they now have a mod chip for the Xbox 360 and they are testing it now. They are expecting to finish testing and start sales in a mere 2 weeks!

No word at this time what functionality we can expect from this new mod chip, but I am sure that the info will be forthcoming soon. We will keep you updated as new information becomes available

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Breakthrough On Kiosk Disk - Flash

Illicitx and other warm-hearted users from Xbox-scene forums have made some great progress on making Xbox 360 running 3rd party swf files. According to his description, the reason why others failed to run 3rd party is due to a wrong compression method. The Xbox 360 requires v6/7 flash Zlib compression for the swf files to run. The resolution of the swf should be 1280*[email protected], flash version 6 or 7. Animations are working.

After this great finding, he managed to replace HexicDeluxe.swf with a signed replacement HexicDeluxe.swf with a digital clock and a button example.

The digital clock has not been released yet, but you can play with the button example [here]. Note that the key mapping is not the same with the PC keyboard, quite some keys cannot be accepted and displayed.

Other details of the flash player in Xbox360 by Kanderson:

* The 360 Flash Player (xex) is extremely unstable, and seems to be unfinished as to date.
* Some of the game functions refer to XENON, which would also point to the dev status of the player and the game.
* The player plays Flash 6, but not all seems to be implemented; the 6 event system, and Object.registerclass (which is needed to code in the 6 style OOP way) don't work. Events need to be set like you should set them in Flash 5. (on a movieclip, using onClipEvent([event])).
* fsCommands do work, but are unstable, and can cause crashes. fscommand("exec", ".\bla\device\file.xex"); does not work.
* Strangely enough hexic shows getURL being implemented for not only the "hacky" way of calling fscommands, hexic also uses a "real" getURL to go to the shop webpage. We've tried to do this, resulting in Arakon's 360 disconnecting from xbox live upon calling the command. This might point to the implementation of a webbrowser (!!!) either in the current 360, or in the XENON dev boxes.
* Animation works like it should, and judging by the game HEXIC, it runs extremely fast on the 360)
* There are some strange properties set on _root, supposedly for live support.

Seems like those quick withdrawals of admission on the part of Microsoft last year regarding the possibility of an HD-DVD enabled Xbox 360 were a little premature, if CNN Money's sources are to be believed.

According to the source, Microsoft is expected to make a slew of announcements at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show which kicks off this week in Las Vegas. Bill Gates, the keynote speaker at this year's CES, is expected to reveal more information on the rumored HD-DVD upgrade to the 360 on Wednesday.

"Microsoft is also expected to make several announcements at CES, but will mainly use the show as the chance to talk about Vista, its first upgrade to its Windows operating system in five years. Gates has used past keynotes at CES to announce new products, including the Xbox 360. Richard Doherty, an analyst with research firm Envisioneering Group, said that while he thinks Gates' main message will concern Vista, he also thinks Gates will talk about HD-DVD as part of Xbox 360."

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Xbox 360 4th Most Searched Item on Google in 2005

Yes, it seems that the Xbox 360 has earned a coveted spot in Google's top search requests for 2005. All the gamers out there eager to chew on some delicious morself of information on the first of the next-gen systems catapaulted the 360 to one of the top five spots on the list.

This fact is made all the more surprising considering that the 360 only came out in November 22. Though we're sure that all the pre-launch buzz helped, we're pretty confident that it was the post-launch madness that truly bolted the 360 to the list. No other system, portable or console, made the list.

Only three other items listed higher in Google's list: 3. The Tsunami that devasted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. 2. Hurricane Katrina and 1. Janet Jackson!?

We've received an email from Steddy claiming that all the High Score tables for Xbox Live have been deleted and reset today, at least in the UK where Steddy hails from. If this is true, this could either be a horrendous blunder on Microsoft's part, or a New Year tradition we can come to expect every January 1st. If you have anything to add to this developing story, please leave a comment or visit the 360Updates Forums and tell us your findings on the breaking news.

Update: So far the comments verify this story and many scores were lost system wide.

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Leader Boards Are Being Fixed Now

Major Nelson has answered the issue of some leader boards today. Currently the issue has been identified, and most of the leader boards has been fixed, except the Geometry Wars: Evolved, which the team is still working on. He claimed that the problem is not a result of a hack or security problem, but simply a bug.

When a PC using HD-DVD technology trying to get a coupon for Windows license, the price will be reduced. Although Microsoft refused to comment on this issue, EE Times has “also” announced that they are adopting HD-DVD on their homepage. Compared to the free support that Microsoft has offered to the HD-DVD, Blu-ray adopters will have to pay $30 more to get the license.

$30 might be unable to explain the relationship between Toshiba and Microsoft. But to say the least, HD-DVD is extremely important to Microsoft now.

Ok, I am marking this as a rumor right now, but PALGN has just published a list of Xbox 360 titles and their prices for Australia. It isn’t pretty, some games reaching prices of up to $119.95 AU ($87.79 USD). Again, these prices have not yet been confirmed:

According to reports obtained by Gamasutra, a number of subscribers to the North American GameFly video game rental service have received messages regarding an Xbox 360 hardware fault that potentially scratches game discs, making them unplayable.

The issue has previously been discussed at length on a number of fan websites, with the problem being particularly pronounced if users move the Xbox 360 while it is in use. However, some consumers are reporting that their Xbox 360 hardware will scratch discs without being moved.

The disc scratching problem is evidently widespread enough that GameFly has prepared a 'form letter' to send to all consumers who return Xbox 360 discs with defects on them, commenting:

"We have received reports that certain XBOX 360 consoles have caused damage to GameFly videogames. Unfortunately, we have been notified that you recently returned a damaged XBOX 360 game.

As a precaution, we have removed all XBOX 360 games from your GameQ. Please contact Microsoft at 1-800-4MY-XBOX. Please do not rent XBOX 360 games until you have resolved this issue.

In the future, should GameFly receive XBOX 360 games from you that have been damaged, you will be charged a replacement fee."

Representatives from GameFly had not returned calls inquiring about the extent of the problem by press time. Microsoft itself has previously commented to VNUNet regarding post-launch Xbox 360 technical issues: "We have received a few isolated reports of consoles not working as expected. The call rate is well below what you'd expect for a consumer electronics product of this complexity."

Hackaday has posted a mod for using ATX power supply for your Xbox 360. Might be an option when your big black brick goes over heat.

You need to cut the power cord and wire it with a 5V plug, then connect it with the 5V output of the ATX power supply. Then, short-circuit pin 13 and 14 with a clip instead of cutting the wires in the original article.

There is an eternal question that haunts the Xbox 360 community: Why won't the French be given permission to bash someone with a wicked haymaker to the nards?

While you ponder that little nugget, consider this, the French can -- all thanks to the creative work of Gamersreports.com.

In light of the news that the new Fight Night demo was released on Xbox Live today, though not in regions outside America, I'm sure there's been a few of you out there holding backyard brawls in "authentic" boxing poses, while your friends on the side of the house discuss how realistic it looks when Timmy gets his nards bashed in and how you don't really need the 360.

Quit it and just follow these steps and you'll be rocking your boxing moves on your television and not on poor ol' Timmy.

1. Head to Microsoft's Passport site and choose Create Hotmail Account.
2. While you're filling out the info, it'll ask you where you're from. Be sure to choose the region where the demo is available, not where you live. For Fight Night, you'd choose USA.
3. To allow you to register your e-mail address, Microsoft will require that you provide some info (to make sure you're not lying, he, he).
4. Here are a few addresses you can use, though you can use any valid address for any of those countries. Remember, Google is your friend. He likes you.

Valid addresses:
United States
Postal Code: 10012
State: New York, City New York City
Phone Number: 1-866-530-1234

5. When you're done with that, activate your e-mail account, turn on your Xbox 360 and go to "Switch Profiles."
6. Create a new profile and Xbox Live account, choosing a silver account so you won't have to pay.
7. Just enter your phone number from one of the addresses above and you're done. So when you find out there's a new demo, just switch over to the foreign account and start downloading. As easy as that.

So, to recap, the French can open a profile for America to play our demos, and if Germany or Japan ever gets an exclusive download, us Americans can join in on the fun too. That is if Microsoft doesn't find another way to stop this. Don't know why Microsoft would do that, though, they did, after all, launch globally.

As a consolation, you should really consider Timmy be allowed to play first, what with his nards having paid the ultimate sacrifice and all.

The super classic fighting game now plays on Xbox 360! Capcom today announced that they are offering Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting in Xbox Live Arcade. The game not only brings you the original experience of the game, but also takes advantage of the online feature of the console, to offer a seamless multiplayer game mode. A “Quarter Match” mode is also going to be included in the game. You can download a free demo version of the game from Xbox Live Arcade – 2 playable characters for one match. The game will be released in early 2006.